The badlands of New Mexico epitomise the raw, stark beauty
of the Wild West. Vast mountain ranges and plateaued mesas stand impassive in
the desert haze. Ragged gorges, carved out by the Rio Grande River, rip into
the land like an open wound. Rows of aspen trees turn to a chemical yellow in
the relentless southwestern sun, spotlighting the rolling ranches that are home
to cattle and horses. And above it all, the infinite New Mexico sky, an almost
physical presence pressing down upon the horizon like a paperweight.

The state of New Mexico has so much beauty that you can’t
help but feel sorry for poor old Roswell, a small town in the south. The
country round here is lacking almost all of the above. In fact, the only thing
that Roswell country has got going for it aesthetically is… flatness. Nowhere
does flatness like Roswell. The desert here is a ruler-edge sheet of mute brown
dirt, studded with the occasional spiky yucca tree, and goes on and on and on,
much in the same interminable way as a pub bore.

But while Roswell might not have much, what it does have is
out of this world. This town is the UFO capital of the USA – perhaps the only
place on Earth where aliens have actually landed. The story goes that, in 1947,
a Roswell rancher named Mac Brazel came across a field of metallic debris. The
metal was unlike any he had seen before; he could pick it up, scrunch it in his
hand and watch it spring back to its original shape. That same day, a local
undertaker received a call from a military base asking for a supply of
child-sized caskets. Arriving at the hospital, he was met by a nurse who told
him in a panic that she’d seen military doctors examining the bodies of a
number of child-sized grey aliens with huge saucer-like eyes.

Immediately after the
incident, the military released a press release confirming that there had been
a UFO crash in the area. But a week later this was retracted, and another
release was written, saying that the debris was simply that of a military
weather balloon. It was too late. The legend of an alien landing in Roswell
spread across the country, and then the world. In 1991, a museum dedicated to
the incident was opened and subsequently sparked an entire alien economy in the
town. Roswell has dozens of alien souvenir shops and bars selling alien beer,
all capitalising on the extraterrestrial economic stimulus. Even the
streetlamps have alien eyes painted on.

Mark Briscoe is the library director of the UFO Museum and,
unsurprisingly, has no doubt that aliens landed here. He believes that the military
covered up evidence of the landing in to order to prevent mass hysteria, but
used information from the captured aliens to develop new technology. ‘In the 20
years after Roswell, humans invented more new technology than we had done in
the previous 200,’ he says. ‘The iPhone 5 is more powerful than the computer we
used to land on the moon! Humans are smart, but we’re not that smart. We’ve
definitely had help. Probably through reverse engineering from alien
technology.’

Despite Mark’s adamant stance, the museum is careful to
leave all options on the table, which is a relief given the somewhat flaky
nature of the evidence. One section even lists common ways by which fake photos
of UFO s are made – by photographing a lit lampshade reflected through a window,
hanging a hat on a string, and throwing a hub cap in the air.

Whatever the truth of the 1947 incident, there is
undoubtedly something otherworldly about New Mexico. The vast space – it’s the
fifth biggest state in the US, with a population of only two million – lets the
imagination run free. And the infinite emptiness of the brilliant sky above
means that on the rare occasions when an object, such as a plane or a hot-air
balloon, does pass through, the bright contrast lends it such a fierce
intensity that it confuses the eye. After spending time here, you can easily
understand why virtually everyone you speak to has a story about seeing a light
or unidentified shape in the sky.

But not everyone puts
it down to extraterrestrial activity; other explanations are easily at hand. In
the centre of the state, a four-hour drive from Roswell, lies an enormous
segment of fenced-off flatland, almost devoid of population. This is the White
Sands Missile Range, the perfect place for the US military to test out their latest
bombs, rockets and planes without fear of upsetting the neighbours. Everything
from V2 rockets – technology co-opted from the Germans after WW II and used for
the first space shuttles – all the way through to modern missile defence
systems has been tested here. Nearby lies Trinity, the site of the first atomic
bomb trial in 1945. And New Mexico remains at the forefront of space-age
technology – Richard Branson is even building his Spaceport America base here,
in the hope of breaking the final frontier of space tourism.

Unsurprisingly, with all these flying explosives zooming
about, access to the missile range is restricted, save for one area: the White
Sands National Monument. Here, a remarkable geological quirk has turned some
275 square miles of desert into a glistening, ice-white beach. Rolling dunes of
white gypsum eroded from the surrounding mountains stretch out as far as the
eye can see. It looks for all the world like Arctic tundra, and if it wasn’t
for the desert sun beating down, you’d be excused for putting on an extra layer
before leaving the car. Walking across these pristine dunes is a mind-blowing
experience – you feel like Lawrence of Arabia discovering Antarctica. And White
Sands is certainly consistent with New Mexico’s ET spirit: few landscapes would
look so at home on an alien planet as this.

New Mexico’s military presence provides another take on the
state’s UFO mysteries. Could the Roswell incident have been caused by the
misfiring of some new-fangled military equipment? That’s certainly the view of
Norio Hayakawa, a Japanese-American who has spent most of the last 35 years
studying the history of UFO sightings. Norio lives in the state’s largest city,
Albuquerque, which manages to combine Route 66-style roadside motel culture,
modern university life and a Spanish-built Old Town that looks like something
straight of a John Wayne movie. Norio argues that the US government exploited
the American public’s propensity for conspiracy theories and fuelled rumours of
an alien crash in order to cover up what they were really doing in New Mexico.

‘UFO just means
“unidentified flying object”,’ he explains. ‘UFOs and aliens are two completely
separate things. I think that the association of UFOs with aliens is a
brilliant strategy by the government in order to create a “laughter curtain”,
so that people think you’re a crackpot for talking about places like Area 51 [a
supposed alien base in Nevada]. Which is all very convenient, because it means
no-one asks questions about what’s really going on.’

Albuquerque has its own version of Area 51, the Manzano
Mountains in the centre of yet another military base. Norio drives me there,
pointing out the electric fences that surround it. He explains that the main
mountain is actually hollowed out, Thunderbirds-style, in order to store
nuclear weaponry and airborne technology. Norio believes that the US military
were once developing new flying machines here that were crescent-shaped, and
from a distance would look like flying saucers. ‘It could have been one of those
that crashed at Roswell,’ he says. ‘They didn’t want anyone to find out what
they were up to, so encouraged the alien rumours.’ The idea of an alien
conspiracy is thus a conspiracy itself.

And so the plot thickens. But maybe those searching for
extraterrestrial beings in Roswell are looking in the wrong place. Perhaps they
should start at Taos, a small but lively northern town which has become a haven
for New-Age spiritualists, hippies and artists. Here lives a group of people
certain that they are not from this planet.

The road from Albuquerque to Taos runs through Santa Fe, the
oldest state capital in the USA. It is New Mexico’s cultural centre, a
beautiful city packed with art galleries and studios. Its high altitude, sharp
light and mountains have provided artistic inspiration for thousands of
painters and sculptors ever since Georgia O’Keeffe, one of America’s most
revered painters, moved to the area in 1949. The town is built almost entirely
with adobe – desert clay mixed with straw, sticks and water – and the buildings
are low-lying, with rounded corners. Adobe is true desert architecture; the
buildings look as if they have arisen out of the earth of their own accord,
strong and hardy like yucca trees, but with a childlike naivety that makes a
stroll around town feel like you’re entering a cartoon world.

An ancient example of adobe architecture exists at Taos
Pueblo, a Native American settlement on the edge of Taos, in the north of the
state. The Pueblo peoples are one of the oldest groups of Native Americans, and
there has been a community living in the multi-tiered adobe buildings in Taos
for some 1,000 years. Small, boxy, yet surprisingly spacious rooms are stacked
up on each other, with ladders between the levels. When they were first built,
the only way into each apartment was through holes in the roofs – the lack of
ground-level entry points meant that the Pueblo could draw up the ladders in
defence when attacked by groups such as the Spanish conquistadors or rival
Native American nations.

Cameron Martinez, or New Eagle to give his Pueblo name, is a
29-year-old film student who grew up in a second-floor ‘apartment’ on the north
side building. ‘I feel lucky to have lived somewhere with such a historic link
to our ancestors. Unlike other Native nations, we’ve never been relocated – our
people have lived in this place for centuries,’ he says. ‘There is no
electricity or running water within the Pueblo. Most people have a modern house
elsewhere on the reservation, and so the time spent living in the Pueblo is for
intense religious rituals, for learning how to live in the traditional ways, to
become selfsufficient.’ The Pueblo people are avid hunters and Cameron says
that he still uses a handmade bow and arrow to shoot down birds from the sky.

As for so many people in New Mexico, that blindingly blue
firmament plays a significant role in Pueblo culture. Indeed, the Pueblo people
here believe that they actually come from the skies or, to put it another way,
that they are extraterrestrial. ‘Our stories tell us that we originated in the
cosmos,’ says Cameron, scanning the 360-degree mountain horizon that wraps
around the settlement. ‘We don’t believe we are from this planet; we are forces
of energy that came from somewhere else, but took human shape. And when we die,
our bodies will return to this Earth, but if we have lived according to the
traditional ways, our souls will flow back to the sky as energy’.

Much of the northern swathe of the state belongs to Native
peoples – Pueblo, Apache, Navajo. Each nation has its own creation stories, its
own legends that help to explain how the environment in which they live came to
be, and how they as people arrived in these lands. But for all the differences,
there is a common thread – and it’s no surprise that the sky is the overarching
link.

Shiprock is a roadside town and administrative centre in the
Navajo reservation. It takes its name from the huge, red rock that stands aloof
in the desert, towering above a narrow ridge that points towards it like an
arrow. In Navajo language, this rock is called Tsé Bit’a’í, the rock with
wings. Legends about its origin vary from it being a flying rock that brought
the Navajo people to this area, to being the home of two huge bird monsters who
occasionally swoop down from the sky and feast upon any Natives they find
below.

The tension between the two Navajo legends – on the one
hand, the sky being the source of life, on the other, a constant threat – is
one that lies at the heart of the alien obsession here: are aliens helpful
friends contributing their technological expertise? Are they intruders looking
to abduct anyone who crosses their path? Or are tales of their existence a
front for the military who want to dominate the skies with explosive force?
Whatever the truth, there’s no doubt that travelling through this huge land
makes you conscious of how small human beings are in the grand scheme of
things. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that New Mexico is a place that’s
forever looking up to the heavens for something bigger than itself.